Dingdingdingding it’s a new episode of the plants and pipettes podcast! This week, Tegan brought you a paper about how plants recognise their family growing left and right of them. Joram looked at vernalisation and how it is triggered after winter when plants bolt and produce flowers. Enjoy!
Tegan’s paper: Crepy, M. A. and Casal, J. J. (2015), Photoreceptor‐mediated kin recognition in plants. New Phytol, 205: 329-338. doi:10.1111/nph.13040
Joram’s paper: Gibbs, D. J., Tedds, H. M., Labandera, A.-M., Bailey, M., White, M. D., Hartman, S., … Holdsworth, M. J. (2018). Oxygen-dependent proteolysis regulates the stability of angiosperm polycomb repressive complex 2 subunit VERNALIZATION 2. Nature Communications, 9(1), 5438.
Tegan’s favourite plant is Ophioglossumreticulatum which has a very large genome.
The paper on pipettes inspired by plants: Nakamura, K., Hisanaga, T., Fujimoto, K., Nakajima, K., & Wada, H. (2018). Plant-inspired pipettes. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 15(140), 20170868.
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Our opening music is Caravana by Phillip Gross
Until next time!
Hey, I haven’t finished this week’s podcast yet but here’s a link to a book that describes the origin of the name polycomb. https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/science/article/pii/B9780128097373000015
For those that don’t have access, ‘Polycomb (Pc) mutations were first described by Ed Lewis in 1978, and the gene was characterized as a repressor of the Drosophila homeotic genes, which are key developmental genes that determine the anterior–posterior identity of embryonic domains. The name, as usual in Drosophila, comes from a common phenotype of the mutation. In this case, the dominant phenotype of flies heterozygous for a Pc loss of function mutation is the appearance of a sex comb—a row of thick bristles usually found only on the anterior legs of male flies, on the second and sometimes third legs…’
Thank you for the information! It’s always great to learn more about the origins of names and nomenclature 😊